I want to try and keep this blog as light and informative as possible, but our daily lives are regularly touched on by events and situations that are not always that pleasant.

As a herbalist, the triune I follow is Awareness-Change-Health. For me, this has proved the best approach to implement wherever I see sickness.

One area that is riddled with disease is our present medical system. In fact, there was yet another report on the news last night about the strain the hospitals are under, and how they are on the verge of collapse. The answer, to date, has been to hire and fire....throw more money at it...or better still....get more for less from the already overburdened staff of the NHS. However, the disease that the NHS is facing is really just the end result of a deeper underlying cause. Essentially, a large part of the orthodox medical approach does not work. This is because the very foundation from which it now practices is flawed.

I think it is important to be clear about what I mean when I say that " a large part of the orthodox medical approach does not work." Basically, the orthodox medical profession has developed a system that predominately treats the symptoms not the underlying cause. This policy has greatly been influenced by the increasing power of the pharmaceutical industry since the end of the second world war. Treating the symptoms has long be recognised as being far more profitable than actually establishing a cure. Yet, as my fellow herbalist and friend Lucy Jones states on her Myrobalan Clinic website,"Treating the symptoms is the equivalent of placing a bucket under a leaking roof. If you ignore the underlying problem it will gradually get worse." This means there can never be true healing for most people treated by this system. Rather than get to the root problem of the dis-ease, the bulk of the treatment is spent on providing drugs or surgical procedures to mask or ease the symptoms. If the medicines do not provide a cure, then the patient is dependent on them for years to come. This results in great profit for the pharmaceutical giants, while the patient is doomed to decline even more, leading to an ever growing list of drugs required to keep them functional and counter the side effects caused by their toxic regimen.

Another reason why this has been able to continue is the orthodox medical profession's ability to use its social and financial power to influence government and position itself as the font of all serious medical knowledge. This is a gross misrepresentation of the truth! Furthermore, their privileged, if not earned, position was secured by the aggressive dominance of the reductionist "scientific" approach over that of the more holistic understanding of the human condition, seeing dissenters treated with similar venom as the religious heretics of the past. The gains made for alternative medicine by the likes of Bach and Hahnemann were largely due to their membership in the orthodox fraternity (as it mostly was at the time).

The bulk of patients that find their way to my colleagues and myself usually arrive after an initial consultation with an allopathic practitioner. I have no problem with this, as doctor's have at their disposal numerous and differing diagnostic tools that we do not have. These will give a further insight into the case although not fundamentally change the alternative approach to the dis-ease. On the other hand, many of the patients seen by herbalists have been under the care of orthodox medicine for 10, 20, 30 years or more without any significant progress in the case. The defence for this is that the palliative care is all that can be achieved against the disease in question. Yet I, and my numerous colleagues, have endless documented accounts that illustrate, again and again, the ability of an alternative approach to reduce dependence on medicines, greatly improve the quality of life....and yes!....even facilitate a cure in endless cases where orthodox medicine has failed. If there are better methods outside of the orthodox approach....and there are thousands of living testimonials out there to prove it, why is the alternative system not being more vigorously embraced by the powers that be? Failure to do so is causing great suffering. Why is the patient not being put first when treatment is being considered?! I will touch on this in my next blog

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